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Behind the Scenes with Shane Corkery - Part 3

Hey folks. Shane again.

Today, set was practically ransacked by a bawdy group of teenagers. In actual fact, the bawdy group of teenagers was a perfectly lovely group of teenagers, but we paid them to pretend to be bawdy in a party scene. It's called being an actor, don't you know--actually we call it being a Background Performer so we don't have to pay you more!

A small and lovely house on Dewdney Avenue here in Indian Head became, for a brief afternoon, a scene of bacchanalian revelry the likes of which Indian Head has never scene. (Actually, that is a lie. The August 12th edition of the Indian Head - Wolseley News featured the headline "Party Turns Ugly" on the front page. The second paragraph of the article states that the damage included "two pulverized heads of cabbage." Seriously.)

It was actually a lot of fun to find myself at a high school party, so accurately recreated--though I remember less smoke machines and lasers at the parties I attended. All the more fun, because Zarqa Nawaz was sitting in the director's chair. Zarqa, for those of you who might not now, is the creator of the show. She has lived in Regina, Saskatchewan for years, and it was her own mosque that was the inspiration for the show. She's directed a whole slew of short films and a feature documentary, but this is the first time she's directed an episode of the show she created! As a Muslim, she admitted that a teenage party scene with alcohol, loud music and dancing it was "far outside of her own personal experience."

Don't worry Zarqa, it was for me too. Except that I didn't have a strong connection to my faith in my back pocket as a handy-dandy excuse. I was just highly unpopular.